Good Linux distro for a laptop?

A

Archer75

Supreme [H]ardness
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Oct 10, 2001
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I've used Linux a bit on the desktop, but is there a particular distro that would work better for a laptop?
 
Gentoo works good for me. Very well laid out install guide and the forums are wonderful for help.
 
i have knoppix on my laptop, and it works good, it has drivers for everything that i need on my laptop.

good easy to use distro
 
I'm running Mandrake on my laptop.... though i can't get the damn wireless card to work with it. So i use Windows when i'm on campus.
 
Oh, my...

Well, I was having a discussion about this with a few friends of mine recently—mostly me bitching and venting and being frustrated as I worked things out (at my own site)—but I've settled on Fedora for my dual-boot laptop, even though I was previously running Slack 9.0 for a while and a short run of Lindows (to see how it worked).

My main issues (not distro specific):
  • Comprehensive battery support: the latest kernel, while still having some ACPI bugs, handles this pretty well. I would recommend installing a distro that takes advantage of the latest kernel instead of updating after install (YMMV).
  • Graphical administration: I wouldn't recommend any single distro above others on this case, but I would like to toss in my opinion that KDE seems to have more consistent administrative tools than I have noticed on other window managers. This is also personal preference, and YMMV here, too.
  • Less dependency problems: This was a big problem for me when discussing with my friends, because I get sick of having to install a bunch of other things before installing what I want. If it's a dependency, then why not include it in the damn package? Whatever the answer, yum seems to handle these issues fairly well, and my experience with apt pretty much comes up the same. For graphic interface, I keep hearing wonderful things about Open Carpet, but haven't had time to work out all the kinks to getting it installed on Fedora yet. Basically, think apt and yum with a graphic interface instead of command-line. Very nice.
  • I know people hate them, but more graphical walkthroughs (wizards): they remove aspects of the OS that are ridiculously complex to the user who wants to choose a few settings and "just work." Obviously, keep the "hands-on" way of doing things viable, but some more less-complex setup guides would be useful to the casual user (while the power user loves his/her hands-on approach).

And none of those issues are absolute, nor are they not workable in more than one current distro. Like I said, I use FC2 for my lappie, but any one of the other many distros could do just fine by you, depending on how much time and energy you want to spend on it, as well as how much understanding of Linux you have to begin with. Despite my experience, I'm very much a novice to the idea of fiddling with Linux on a desktop/laptop in some ways, while in others I'm not. It's much different than setting up a basic workstation or working out specific server tasks (which even then, I'm not a pro at it).
 
I use Gentoo just for the way it handles dependencies, and it makes it sort of easy to upgrade everything when you need to. Plus the forums are a great source of help.
 
The actual distro isn't as important as knowing if your hardware is supported...

after that, it's all a matter of personal preference & possibly a bit of work setting some things up.


http://www.linux-laptop.net/ is a great resource to find out if & how well your hardware is supported & how to set it up.
 
Slack 9.1 for me.

Hardware is your main concern. Distros are really irrelevant.
 
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